[German]Microsoft got a hint from a Google developer from the Chrome team about the slow jump lists in the taskbar. Now the company is investigating the matter. Here are a few details.
Regarding the user interface, Windows 10 is in many places only to be understood as a broken and tinkering grave for failed developers. Different context menu styles, broken start menu or not working search etc. A corpse in the cellar are probably also the slow opening jump lists, as MSPU reports here. The Google Chrome for Windows developers Bruce Dawson was annoyed about the fact that jump lists only open after 200 milliseconds. Instead of going to the hamster wheel feedback hub, Dawson chose his own way (I do the same). Dawson has published a post on GitHub that deals with slow jump lists.
I frequently right-click on items in the task bar in order to view their properties or close them. Last year I reported a ~500 ms delay due to massively redundant ReadFile calls. This was fixed. However, closer analysis shows that there still remains a 200-250 ms delay from the moment that the mouse button is released until the menu appears. This is well beyond the ideal human interaction times and is a constant frustration. I don't want to wait for my computer, especially when doing simple and repetitive actions that I know it should be able to do roughly ten times faster. Closing multiple programs in this way becomes frustrating, even after the ReadFile fixes.
Dawson has a fairly well-equipped Windows 10 machine, but it is too slow to react to jump lists, he writes. Last year he had complained about a delay of 500 milliseconds to open a jump list. Currently, the delay from releasing the mouse to displaying the jump list is 200 to 250 milliseconds – too long for an optimal GUI design.
The comments go back and forth a bit – and an MS employee tries to lure Bruce Dawson onto the 'read, laughed, punched' feedback hub loop. But a few days ago, Microsoft employee Rich Turner (bitcrazed, a senior program manager at Microsoft) sent a comment. Once he reopened the already closed case and forwarded it to the product team. The team is investigating the behavior – as soon as there is something new, they want to get in touch.
The problem might be (in my eyes) that all the GUI stuff is described in XAML. And that is just slow in the interpretation of the configuration files.
I suggest you parse some XML – it is not slow compared to other text formats.
I used to believe parsing XML was very slow, and I wrote a program to parse a large XML file to prove it. I proved myself wrong quite quickly.